


magnets under the skin

by orphan_account



Series: Attack on Avengers [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Jean hates tomatoes almost as much as he hates himself, Jean is an angst bucket, Jean is the Winter Soldier, Jean thinks that theory is sound, Jean's sister is awesome, M/M, Marco loves both, home is not a place, magnets are a metaphor, my friend made me publish this, unless that place is somewhere in Marco's chest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-23 23:39:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1583651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Your name is Jean Kirschtein and I love you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	magnets under the skin

It’s been two days since you failed your first mission.

The thought is satisfying. The thought is horrifying. You spent ten minutes waiting at your check-in point and then _ran_ like the devil was on your heels. ( _And maybe that’s exactly what was happening._ )

You cannot go back to Marco Bodt and his hope and his insistence that he knows you ( _Your name is Jean Kirschtein._ ) and the bullet that you put in him and the face you bashed half-in. ( _Your name is Jean Kirschtein and I love you._ ) ( _I’m with you to the end of the line._ )

Jean Kirschtein has a place in an exhibit in the Smithsonian. You go to it and stare at the neat man on the screens and his arrogant smile and his determination and think _that’s not me that’s not me that’snotmenotmenot._ You stare at the scrawny boy on the screens and at the stronger man he becomes and it’s like something burrowed into your bones and is dragging you toward him by the marrow. _That’s him._

( _That’s about the time you allow yourself to stop thinking of him as the Captain or the Mission and just Marco._ ) You still don’t go ( _home_ ) back.

Jean Kirschtein has a little sister. She was sixteen when he went off to war and never came back. Now, she’s… eighty-seven. But, alive- you look it up.

You set your feet on the road to Brooklyn and ignore the magnets under your skin.

You break into a nursing home and Ninette is not surprised in the least. Marco called her, told her you were alive. “Nice to see you, Jean. Sit down?” She says, like nothing happened. Like there’s nothing wrong. You think you might remember her eyes, but the old woman sitting in the chair is otherwise foreign, and that’s how you want it. Familiar things that aren’t familiar ( _Marco_ ) are going to be the death of you.

She pours you a cup of coffee and says that if you need it she’ll rent you an apartment nearby. When you say you don’t need help she laughs and the fire in the pit of your stomach is familiar. You hold onto it with both hands and don’t care that it burns. Better than the ice.

Your apartment is tiny and the ceiling leaks but you have a place. You have a base of operations and no voices are saying _wipe him_ in the shadows of it. ( _You remember a tinier one, and the heating was always broken and Marco would huddle in every blanket you owned and wheeze and you sat on the bed next to him and prayed to a god you’d never believed in to just give him a little more time and you’d rubbed at his arm and thought one more breath one more one more and fallen asleep thinking it and woken up in the morning with your heart in your throat._ ) ( _You remember that in the middle of cooking yourself dinner and come back to the present curled up on the floor pressing your hands into your face and you cut your cheek open with your metal hand and everything was burnt but that was fine because you were nauseous anyway._ ) ( _The magnets tug a little more insistently. You lock the door because you don’t trust yourself not to sleepwalk out and all the way back to Washington._ )

The little flashes of memories that come back give you headaches and heartaches and you don’t know which you hate more.

You remember the day your parents brought your sister home from the hospital, one day. You tell her the next time you visit and she grins. You remember the day your mother died, on another. You cry in your sister’s lap even though you don’t remember anything else about your mother, don’t remember the color of her eyes or what her voice sounded like or what her perfume smelled like, but you remember the _hurt_ when she was gone. ( _“Brown, just like yours. Her voice was beautiful, I can’t believe that didn’t come back first. Lavender. She loved you she loved you she loved you so much.”_ ) ( _There are two people in your family still alive and one of them is old and frail and the other you cannot go back to because there’s still a steady wail in the back of your head telling you to complete the mission and you cannot risk that._ )

You remember little things, an ice cream parlor and getting milkshakes and drinking one and a half of the two you got sometimes because you’d drag Marco down there when he was getting over whatever was wrong that week and he never had an appetite. You remember a restaurant and for some reason tomato soup sticks in your head.

You find a different restaurant because the other one doesn’t exist anymore. You find that you hate tomato soup but keep ordering it because you remember.

Marco finds you maybe six months after you tried to kill him.

“You hate tomatoes.” He says calmly, sliding into the booth across from you.

Your metal arm twitches. “I noticed. Why do I remember ordering it?”

He shrugs, a little smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “You couldn’t ever get me to eat much when I was sick. Tomato soup, maybe. It was ridiculous, you practically poured it down my throat.” Ah. That explains that. His eyes are sad, no matter if he’s smiling or not, and something in the back of your head overrides the commands to finish the mission long enough to say _you kiss him right now you idiot._

You don’t, but you think about it. You get a flash of lips on freckles and fingers twined together. It’s a good memory, but it’s faded.

“Do you have somewhere to stay?” You tell him yes and he looks a little crestfallen and a little relieved at the same time and you wonder how that’s possible. He writes his address and phone number on a napkin and tells you that if you need anything you can always come to him. ( _Your name is Jean Kirschtein and I love you._ )

You remember waking up on a table and feeling hopeless and you were in the middle of a war you never wanted to be involved with and then there he is, there’s Marco, you must still be asleep but if you were dreaming he’d be smiling and there’s a little relief lurking in his eyes but there’s no smile, he’s frowning he’s upset you want him to be happy.

_“I thought you were dead.” “I thought you were smaller.”_

You come back to yourself and find that the magnets have won out over your willpower. You are standing in front of Marco Bodt’s apartment and it’s raining and you’re so tired.

_“Get out of here!” “Not without you!”_

He opens the door and his eyes are wide and startled and you blurt out “My name is Jean Kirschtein, and I love you.”

 _There’s_ that smile.

Your name is Jean Kirschtein and you found your way home.


End file.
